Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took a swipe at her 2016 opponent on Twitter, suggesting that the president doesn’t have a great track record with science and medicine. She also pointed out that this is a period when an understanding of and a good relationship with science and medicine are in great need.
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Clinton didn’t hold back in her criticism of the president.
“Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse,” Clinton tweeted, referring to the time Trump looked at the 2017 solar eclipse from the White House while not wearing any eye protection.
At the time, as Trump gazed upward an aide could be heard yelling, “don’t look up!”, before the president donned the special glasses that would protect his eyes.
President Trump has been heavily criticized for his handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in America.
Medical experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have had to clarify or correct the president’s remarks on several occasions. This was particularly true after Trump talked up the efficacy of using anti-malaria drug chloroquine to combat coronavirus, a treatment that has yet to be clinically studied.
As Fauci has said, however, there’s only so much he can do when the president starts talking.
“I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” Dr. Fauci told Science , referring to his attempts to make the president stick to factual information during coronavirus briefings.
With President Trump itching to get the economy restarted, he has suggested that businesses around the nation could be re-opening by Easter.
However, public health experts and epidemiologists suggest that’s not a realistic expectation given the ongoing pandemic, with cases and deaths from COVID-19 continuing to slam hospitals.
Nevertheless, President Trump seems determined to forge ahead, repeating several times that “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
Clinton weighed in on that as well, saying that “Letting thousands of people needlessly suffer and die is wrong. It’s also not a recipe for rescuing the economy.”
Trump has also accused China of failing to warn other nations about COVID-19 “three or four months ago.”
China did indeed hide the existence of the virus initially, but it only first emerged in December 2019, so it didn’t even exist during the period Trump referred to. By January 10, China had released a sequence of the novel coronavirus now ravaging the world.
